The Ashen Viper

Were we not meant to know the truth? It is by the hands of loresmen that heroes and villains are risen from history’s foundations, today’s stories that became yesterday’s histories that became the legends of yore. And from those legends emerge truths…of a sort. The truths that best serve a story when the facts have been lost to the decay of time.

The war that spelled the end of the Second Age was long mired in such murky truths, in these legends accepted as history, these fables and songs that served as the only surviving memory of those fateful days. Until now. Until these Forahm Papers, and whatever they may contain within.

For it is not the singular hero and villain who weave a story’s tapestry, but the many hands who break from the foundations and hold the truth aloft.

The ministry official who must investigate a sudden disappearance. The reluctant hero who saved a queen and doomed an entire people in the process. The exile whose very soul threatens the destruction of all around her. The son of a traitor who will stop at nothing to see honor restored to his name. The untested heiress faced with a long-dormant storm coming to rage over her land once more.

And the man whose name endured within the darker threads of history, cursed in the shadows as an assassin of kings, an arbiter of doom, a devil taken flesh. For if there is a truth hidden amongst these papers, it must begin here. It must begin with him: the Ashen Viper.